B009HOTHPE EBOK (6 page)

I quickly take out a piece of paper, write down my name, address, and telephone number, and hand it to him. I said to him, “You’ve never heard of me, but you will!” Then I told him my name was Paul Anka, that I was a songwriter and I’d written this song called “Diana.”

“Okay, kid, see you later,” he said, brushing me off as quickly as he could. The wild thing is that he would eventually become my manager.

*   *   *

When I came to Ottawa in 2005 for a reception, John Topelko, my former Fisher Park High School teacher, remembered me as a young kid coming to him for advice in the fall of 1956. I was in turmoil back then and I told him, “I’ve written up a song, and I’d like to launch this thing, but I can’t see how I could possibly do it without taking a little time off from school.” Mr. Topelko had said, “If you really have a lot of confidence in getting this thing done, by all means go for it.” The song I was in such an all-fired hurry to get recorded was “Diana.”

I’ve always been attracted to mature women. I found that out at an early age. When I was fifteen, I developed a crush on a nineteen-year-old girl who worked as a secretary in the offices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa: Diana Ayoub. It’s been said that she was our babysitter—and she may have been a babysitter for my brother, Andy Junior or my sister Mariam, but my relationship with her wasn’t as titillating as “babysitter” sounds. I saw her in church and at community events—and I was smitten.

Diana was my first infatuation, I had such a serious crush on her. I made my advances as a youngster and failed dismally. She wanted nothing to do with me. Diana was my inspiration, the fantasy girlfriend—and imagined problem (“I’m so young and you’re so old, this my darling, I’ve been told”). In truth it never got anywhere near that. I think she just thought it was funny someone so much younger than her—three years!—wanted to date her. That’s where songs come from: out of stories you tell yourself in your mind.

I started to pester my father for permission to go to New York City again but he was against it. He didn’t want me taking time off from school, didn’t want me traveling alone. That’s when I really turned up the pressure.

The following spring my hopes about a singing career revived when an Ottawa disc jockey called my father with startling news—to my dad anyway. “Andrew,” he told my father, “your boy’s too big for Canada.” Harold Pounds, an executive from Quality Records, and Gerry Myers, an Ottawa disc jockey, had independently been sending reports on me to Am-Par headquarters in New York. They urged Paramount to grab me and sign me up. They wrote back telling the Canadian talent scouts to hold off.

I also found out that some friends of mine, a Canadian group called The Rover Boys that I’d met over at the clubs across the river, were going down there in April. They were a little older and already had a recording contract with ABC, but I talked to them and we came up with the idea that I could go down there with them. Who would’ve known what it would all come to? I wanted to cross that bridge into the future. For me it was always just
Go! go! get! do! Make that fifteen bucks! Sing! sing! sing!
Until it got me to New York, from which everything emanated. I borrowed money to go back to New York a second time with The Rover Boys. That’s when I got the ABC contract. I went down to smell the town.

Just before I left for New York to try and sell my songs, I auditioned for a recording contract at the local record company (Canadian Broadcasting Company). The audition led to an offer of a ten-year contract at $150 a week. In 1957, $150 was a lot of money. For a sixteen-year-old-boy, it was astronomical. My family was prepared to accept the offer until friends began dropping hints that there was no provision in the contract for advancement or hit records. Ten years later, I would still have been drawing $150 a week from the CBC. Hah!

I decided to go to New York on my own and see if I could interest someone in my songs. I had already written a few songs including “Diana,” and I wanted to leave home and try to get it on as a songwriter. Before the trip, everything I had been listening to came from New York. The industry operated from there, so I knew that’s where I had to go to make it. I was a very precocious, adventurous kid. I guess I had that mixture of curiosity and ambition and everything else grows out of that. Of course some basic aptitude for what you do plays a big part in success in the music business, but without the rest—ambition, drive, relentless pursuit of your goal—you got nothing.

I wasn’t all that promising as a matinee idol: I had problems with my height and weight, I was swarthy, and like all teenagers I was preoccupied with my hair. What was I going to do with it? I was forever combing it back, pulling it down in the front. But I had the performing bug like crazy. The writing began to develop, and at that point it all started to come together. Then it just became a question of singing my own material, which was so custom-made for me that nobody else would want to do it. Everyone sensed I had it, this energy and crazy drive in me, but where is he going to go with this? Timing is everything in this world, especially the music business. To want a career in rock ’n’ roll you had to have the guts to pursue it beyond reason because back then the singers you heard on the radio were almost entirely older, established performers and vocal groups. I was the first kid of that kind out of Canada, so it was understandable that not many others even tried to get into it. I didn’t even know what it meant.

Later on, much later, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Celine Dion, they all left. Celine Dion went to Berlitz to learn English; she was French Canadian and hadn’t had a chance to learn English as a kid.

In April 1957, with $500 from my dad I went to New York with my songs—it was do or die. The songs I took to New York with me were “Diana,” “Tell Me That You Love Me,” “Don’t Gamble with Love,” and “I Love You, Baby.” All were written somewhere around ’56, into ’57. I would have been fifteen or sixteen, I’d say, when the writing bug really took hold, when the ideas started to come, and now I was ready. I wanted to do the most impossible thing imaginable: take my songs to New York City and see if anybody else would buy my dreams.

Two

TEEN IDOL

Two weeks later, I’m in New York City sharing a small hotel room with The Rover Boys, trying to figure out where I’m going to sleep ’cause there aren’t enough beds! I didn’t care: I knew my life was going to change in a big way. So I put a mattress down in the bathtub and charted my course.

We stayed at the President Hotel, a small place in the West Forties where musicians and theater people stayed. I was having a great time, hanging out, meeting people. I’d go down to the coffee shop to eat or get a doughnut. Every little thing was just magic for a kid from Ottawa. New York wasn’t dangerous then. You could walk down Eighth Avenue, Broadway, go to the movies in the middle of the night on Forty-second Street!

I checked out the jazz clubs that you could still find on Broadway. I wanted to get a feel of the city and everything I’d read about the music scene in New York.

While eating in the hotel coffee shop one day I ran into this guy from Cuba, a real charming guy, a fantastic bongo and conga player named Chino Pozo, cousin of the great Afro-Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo who virtually invented Latin Jazz. Chano was a tough, rowdy guy who got killed in a bar in Harlem over a bag of marijuana at age thirty-three. His cousin Chino was a sweet mild-mannered guy, very different from his hot-tempered cousin. I used to see Chino play with Peggy Lee in a little jazz club, Basin Street East. It was a very tight stage and I’d be ringside so we’d notice each other. Later I’d see him back at the hotel and say, “Chino, you’re going to work for me one day.” This obviously amused him—“Who is this loco kid?”—but he was always nice about it. Soon after I had my first hit I ran into him again and I said, “Chino, I’m ready! Are you coming to work for me?” He worked with me for years, right up until he died. I ultimately moved him to Vegas and bought him a car—he was amazed, he’d never even driven a car before. He used to cook up a big pot of paella and bring it backstage. You always wanted this guy around—very loyal, and I was loyal to him, too. That’s how it was back then. Somebody’s with you from the beginning, you don’t ever let them go. All my life, he was my bongo player/percussionist. One day in 1980, we were on our way to the airport to go on tour in Canada and we stopped by his condo to pick him up. We knock on the door. No response. Eventually we open a window and climb inside and find he had died in the night.

The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway was the action spot of the music biz, along with the other hive of publishing and songwriting, 1650 Broadway. The Brill Building was a big office building with a restaurant in the basement. We used to go and grab a huge bowl of shrimp for a buck. It was where W. C. Handy and Irving Berlin had hung their hats so that was like walking into the tower of song. Meanwhile, 1650 Broadway was maybe a little hipper since the younger songwriters hung out there.

When you walked down any given hall in those buildings, you would hear piano playing coming out of the doorway. You’d hear Hal David working with Burt Bacharach, who was tinkling a melody in one room, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller harmonizing in another. It was like a music factory, piano plunking and
oo-pah-pahing
on every floor. Doors open, people hanging out in the hallways, smoking, talking, schmoozing, joking, paying off bookies, trying out riffs on each other. In the offices, guys would be playing cards, some of the older guys there praying that rock ’n’ roll would go away. It was the kind of building where you could hang out in just about any office. Everybody knew each other; going from office to office was like a musical guided tour. If I wanted to hang out with Artie Ripp and a bunch of the doo-wop guys, I went up to the fourth floor and stood around the piano, everybody doo-wopping. All the music and talent came out of that building. Hard to imagine today, that we could walk from office to office and see the guys actually writing the hits.

Creativity and thievery flourished side by side in the early days of rock ’n’ roll. There was the notorious Morris Levy, who was part of the Genovese crime family, a handsome, slick, ruthless character like Bugsy Siegel. He took co-writing credit on Frankie Lymon’s “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” and sole credit for “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” And that was nothing unusual. There was a famous saying of Morris Levy’s, “Write a word, get a third,” meaning if you came up with a word or a phrase in a song, you got one third of the writer’s and publishing proceeds. And Levy made sure he put his contribution into as many songs as possible. He’d say stuff like, “No, no, not ‘sun’ it should be ‘fun.’” If anyone asked him about royalties, he’d say, “Royalties? If you want royalties, go to England.”

That year, “Party Doll” by Buddy Knox was my favorite record. I loved anything by The Everly Brothers. The Rover Boys had a big hit, “Graduation Day,” and they brought me in to see Don Costa, who was a producer at ABC-Paramount Records. With that I got my foot in the door and launched into my sales pitch. “Aw, let the kid in, see what he’s got.” They thought it was funny, me being so young and enthusiastic and green about how you do things in the music biz. I guess I was pretty good at promoting myself, because the guy was sold enough to convince the company president, Sam Clark, and the suits to come in and hear me. I’d basically just walked in off the street and plunked out four tunes on the piano—and here were big shots at a major record company taking me seriously.

Imagine the scene: in walks a fifteen-year-old who’s very positive and who has a song (“Diana”) that says something—even though the song is pretty basic—and the whole picture adds up. I mean, I was hardly a pretty boy and barely tall enough to see over the lower half of this Dutch door they had leading to their office stockroom!

Costa had his own funny description of my arrival on the scene: “There we were, jammed into my office listening to little Mr. Five-by-Five pounding out the songs. It was like the movie
Words and Music,
about Rodgers and Hart. Paul was Mickey Rooney playing Larry Hart. Everything frantic, hammed up, overplayed; but he had something.”

I had a tape with my entire catalog on it at that time … four songs: “Diana,” “Tell Me That You Love Me,” “Don’t Gamble with Love,” and “I Love You, Baby.” I played everything I had on the piano for the record company executives. After Costa and Sam Clark heard them all—the room was still vibrating with the last notes—they said, “Paul, you should call your parents and tell them we need to talk about signing you to the label.” I had only been in New York for two weeks and they’re offering me a contract! Right there in the office I called my parents and told them that ABC wanted to sign me. That fateful meeting with Don Costa changed everything: my life as a teenager ended at fifteen.

My parents were taken by surprise but they did have a bit of prior conditioning from my “Blau Wilde De Veest Fontaine” adventure. I’d done local TV in Canada and they’d heard certain industry people say often enough, “Geez, he’s got something. I’d keep an eye on him.” I was hungry, always fighting my parents’ common sense because I knew what I wanted. Knowing how bull-headed I was, they probably figured I was going to stay with it no matter what anybody said.

But New York City, that was a different matter. It’s the Big Apple, the scene, and they’re obviously overwhelmed, very openly humble about it. They sure weren’t show business parents, but still my father wasn’t stupid—he was a very astute businessman. Even after I hit, my dad kept me centered. That’s how Canadians are—anchored. We keep the lower 48 from floating off into the blue.

My parents signed. Don Costa signed along with the president Sam Clark, a great guy, and Larry Newton and Irwin Garr signed, too—these were the top executives at ABC. They wined and dined my parents and came up with a formula. They’d give me a hundred bucks a month to write for their publishing company. The contracts got signed and the folks were sent home. I stayed, and my life began.